Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett were early theater teachers of Carole Schweid, who works the phone just before a Play With Your Food performance in Westport last month. The artistic director of the popular lunchtime theater series came up with the idea a decade ago with producer partner Nancy Diamond. less

Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett were early theater teachers of Carole Schweid, who works the phone just before a Play With Your Food performance in Westport last month. The artistic director of the popular ... more

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Fairfield County actors Bethany Caputo and Patricia Kalember bring a short comedy script to life at one of last month's performances of Play With Your Food,

Fairfield County actors Bethany Caputo and Patricia Kalember bring a short comedy script to life at one of last month's performances of Play With Your Food,

Photo: Contributed Photo

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A Play With Your Food audience gets the chance to talk about what it has just seen with (left to right) writer Fred Stropple, actors Scott Bryce, Susan Vanech, Joanna Keylock and Nadine Willis, and artistic director Carole Schweid. less

A Play With Your Food audience gets the chance to talk about what it has just seen with (left to right) writer Fred Stropple, actors Scott Bryce, Susan Vanech, Joanna Keylock and Nadine Willis, and artistic ... more

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Carole Schweid (fourth from the left) and other "A Chorus Line" company members seen recording the original cast album of the landmark musical in 1975.

Carole Schweid (fourth from the left) and other "A Chorus Line" company members seen recording the original cast album of the landmark musical in 1975.

Photo: Contributed Photo

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For the past decade, former Broadway dancer-actress Carole Schweid has been artistic director of the Play With Your Food series that combines gourmet lunches with short plays at venues in Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield. less

For the past decade, former Broadway dancer-actress Carole Schweid has been artistic director of the Play With Your Food series that combines gourmet lunches with short plays at venues in Greenwich, Westport ... more

Photo: Contributed Photo

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For the past decade Carole Schweid has been tracking down short plays and the perfect actors to work on them for the Play With Your Food series in Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield.

For the past decade Carole Schweid has been tracking down short plays and the perfect actors to work on them for the Play With Your Food series in Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield.

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Former Broadway hoofer finds success with lunchtime theater

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Carole Schweid was too busy working and looking for her next jobs to appreciate how lucky she was to start her career as a Broadway hoofer in the 1970s.

The young dancer arrived on the scene just in time to work with Bob Fosse on "Pippin" and to be in on the ground floor of "A Chorus Line" with Michael Bennett.

The Westport resident, who has been artistic director of the "Play with Your Food" lunchtime theater series for the past decade with her producer partner Nancy Diamond, is modest about her stage accomplishments in the 1970s and 1980s, but you might be able to play one of those "six degrees" games with her name.

Schweid started on Broadway in a 1971 flop musical that starred Shelley Winters -- "Minnie's Boys" about the pushy stage mother of the Marx Brothers -- but she worked with a nice young unknown rehearsal pianist who was about to make a big name for himself, Marvin Hamlisch.

"He was great and you could see that he was going places," Schweid said of the musician whose path she would cross again when she was hired for the workshop production of a musical in development in downtown Manhattan.

"I was doing `Fiddler on the Roof' in a dinner theater with (dancer-writer) Nick Dante, who told me he was rehearsing monologues and that they needed a replacement for somebody who had left the show in rehearsal. It was just a workshop at that point," she said of her reconnection with a choreographer/director who had not hired her for another show two years earlier.

"Oh, I know her. Is she a dancer?" was the question Michael Bennett asked Dante of a performer he recalled from the auditions for the musical "Seesaw."

This time Bennett hired the dancer and Schweid found herself in the second developmental workshop of "A Chorus Line," where Bennett, Dante and Hamlisch were trying to shape interviews with chorus dancers into a new sort of musical about what goes on at the auditions for a big show.

Did Schweid know what she had gotten herself into?

"I think I did. I had seen enough of the work in progress to feel that something really cool was happening," she said.

What she didn't know was that the next two-and-a-half years would be taken up by one of the greatest hits of the era and that she would be stepping into the turbulent life stories of other dancers she had worked with. "A Chorus Line" moved from the Public Theater downtown to the Shubert Theater on Broadway, where it would run for a then-record-breaking 15 years.

"It was a huge success, but people got a little crazy," Schweid said of the publicity spotlight that "A Chorus Line" suddenly focused on performers whose careers had been spent in the backgrounds of other shows. Some of the dancers felt they didn't get properly paid for their stories and others never found suitable follow-up shows.

It was that schooling in quality that led Schweid to emerge from semi-retirement a decade ago to look for the best writers and to tap into the huge pool of Fairfield County actors for a lunch-and-short-plays series that she and Diamond launched in Greenwich, Westport and Fairfield.

"I'm proud of the fact that we are actor-driven and play-driven. It really is all about the quality of the plays we find," she said of a concept that generated a large and enthusiastic audience right from the start. "Once we got it rolling and people got a sense of what we were doing, we found that people who would come to one show would, right away, get their tickets for the next one."

Schweid and Diamond use local restaurants and caterers for the lunch that precedes the short plays.

"I'm always looking for what I call little gems -- short plays that pack a wallop. I want to find stuff you can't get out of your head," Schweid said of the material she spends months tracking down. Sometimes, she finds a perfect short play, other times she carefully extracts scenes from plays by famed writers, such as Neil Simon and Wendy Wasserstein, that can work on their own.

"I look for serious stuff and comedy. Of course, when you find something like a 20-minute radio play by Arthur Miller that is a given. ... we look for good language, a well-written play. But it has to pull an audience right in," she said. "It's not easy to find a really good short play ... a lot of the time they are a little too lightweight for us. We want something the audience will be eager to discuss at the Talk Back after the show."

Because of her background as a performer, Schweid will often pick a piece that she knows will be perfect for the actors she has in mind.

"We have some flexibility because the actors live here, so if I can't get the ideal cast for a play I have in mind, we wait until they are available. ... I want the experience you have with us to be as good as anything you might see anywhere else."